Mobile query-by-capture applications (or “apps”) are growing in popularity. Snap Tell is a music, book, video or video game shopping app that allows searching for price comparisons based on a captured image of the desired product. Vuforia is a platform for app development including vision-based image recognition. Google and Baidu likewise offer visual search capabilities.
Among the technical challenges posed by such functionality is efficient image indexing and visual search query processing. In particular, processing visual search requests transmitted over wireless communications systems necessitates consideration of bandwidth usage by the request process.
There is, therefore, a need in the art for efficient visual search request processing.